A happy tablet to cure depression

for one month supply only.
But this time the doctor said it was better to have the extra tablets in case Sabina’s return was delayed by a coup or a tribal conflict because Africa was known to have such calamities.
In 2002, Sabina was an enthusiastic 22-year-old and a strong member of a Christian youth group in Glen View. She got a visitors’ visa to attend a Christian youth conference in America. Once Sabina got there, she met some Zimbabweans who said to her, “Why would you go back home now that you have set your foot in the Big Apple, the land of milk and honey? If you cannot make it America, you will never make it anywhere else.”
Sabina disappeared from the visiting youth group. She made plans to stay in America, study hard, get a degree, make money then go back to Zimbabwe one day with a nice car, possibly a Hummer, and enough cash to buy a house. That was her dream.
For ten years Sabina waited for the United States home office to approve her application for residence based on a de facto relationship with the father of her child. During that time, she did all kinds of odd jobs, including working as a nurse assistant in American nursing homes, working as a nanny for a wealthy family and cleaning hotel rooms. There was no time to study for a degree.
More recently, she had a job in a 24-hour supermarket. She worked night shift restocking packets of cereal on the shelves. Night shift gave her extra allowances to help support her three children. She came home at seven in the morning, dropped the two older kids at school and the little one at day care. Then she took her anti-depressant tablet and slept for four hours before going to pick up the children.
Her new boyfriend, Dwayne, an African-American, stayed home to look after the children at night. Dwayne was a good guy and he treated Sabina’s children with kindness, like they were his own. When Sabina’s residence permit finally came through, Dwayne agreed to care for the children while Sabina came back to Zimbabwe.
Finally, Sabina was back in the village to see us all. She brought along her antidepressants and a whole kit full of pain killers, bandages, antiseptics, anti vomiting tablets, anti diarrhoea, antacids, sunscreen, mosquito repellents and everything else to make her stay more comfortable.
She quickly gave up on hanging the mosquito net during the night as there was no hook in my thatched rondeville. 
It was harvest time in the village. We were pulling ground nuts, stacking them in piles then carrying them out to dry in the sun. It was hard work made lighter by Sabina’s stories about living in America and Beatrice’s constant talking and laughing. 
Suddenly, Sabina dropped a bunch of nuts and said she had to take her daily tablet immediately. She had forgotten to take it three days in a row. In America the alarm clock on her phone always reminded her to take the tablet. But here, she had lost track of time because nobody looked at time. Sabina took Prozac, a blue pill, and popped it in her mouth.
Beatrice asked if she could have one of Sabina’s colourful tablets from America. “They must be better than what we have here,” Beatrice said. But Sabina said no, her tablets were for depression and they were given to her on prescription only, therefore they could not be shared with anyone else. “What is depression?” Beatrice asked.
Sabina sat down on a rock and explained that depression was a mental illness that she got soon after breaking up with the father of her first baby, an African- American man.
Speaking in Shona and English, Sabina said her disease was a common problem caused by stressful situations such as a bad relationship, loneliness or lack of money. 
Beatrice shook her head in disbelief and said she knew about stress because these days it was an English word that had become part of the village vocabulary.
A village woman often said something was stressful, zviri kundi stresser. But depression? This was a new English word. I said depression was like a deep sadness, kusuwa kukuru.
Sabina nodded and said she had been on the anti-depression tablets for five years now and hopefully, this recurring sadness would one day come to an end and she was going to be normal and happy again.
Beatrice’s mouth was wide open. “Ah? Iwe! Are you mad? Unopenga kani? You think a tablet will get rid of deep sadness?” she asked cynically.
Sabina nodded. “Yes, it does. I take it everyday. When it runs out, the doctor prescribes me some more.” Beatrice accused Sabina of being secretive about her illness. “Sabina, there is no miracle tablet to make a person happy. Hakuna! You are telling us lies. Just come out in the open. You have HIV and like me, you are taking ARVs, antiretroviral drugs”.
Confidentiality did not exist in Beatrice’s vocabulary.  Sabina denied that she was on any such tablets and if she was, she would not hide anything since people can easily live with HIV these days as long as they were on treatment.
Besides, the tablet she was taking was her business and nobody had reason to pry into her privacy or question her way Beatrice was doing. Sabina was quite clearly very annoyed. She was even swearing in English to get Beatrice to see her point.
America had corrupted Sabina’s language too much. Beatrice kept on shaking her head. At this point I stepped in and explained to Beatrice that in America and other Western countries, a lot of people suffer from depression because they are lonely and are often not connected to the community like us.
“When I got really depressed I started drinking too much and eating too much. You should have seen me, I was fat. I am still fat but the fact that I actually managed to pay my own ticket to come here means I am on the mend. Maiguru Beatrice, you know nothing about personal pain. You do not know what it means to have no family close by, to be a single mother, to be lonely and to have no money. Honestly, without these antidepressants, I would have gone mad and committed to a psychiatric hospital,” Sabina said.
“So you think you are not mad as you are sitting there? Taking tablets to make you happy is madness. Find the cause of your sadness and fix it. If I was taking those tablets to be happy, I would have popped in a whole bucketful by now. And I can tell you, they would not have cured me,” Beatrice said, sitting down to take a break from pulling the groundnuts from the hard dry earth.
Over the years, Beatrice’s life was full of stress and she could have easily got depressed. But the people in the community supported her and kept her sane. Beatrice attended St Columbus School until she was 13. Her father married her off, akazvarirwa to an older man. 
Beatrice ran away to work as a farm labourer at Bristol farm in Hwedza before moving to Harare where she made peanut to sell. She returned to the village at 15 and married Gwinhi the hunter. During the war for Zimbabwe’s liberation, she was already a young mother, risking being shot by the Rhodesian forces as a collaborator, cooking clandestine meals for Zanla forces.
At 30 she had eight children and had her first grandchild at 36. She became a widow when Gwinhi died in 2002. Beatrice was accused of killing him with witchcraft poison. She was arrested by the police and locked up in the cell at Sadza Police Station.
Twice a day the police forced her to sit next to her husband’s coffin in the morgue for an hour as punishment. When forensic evidence showed that he died from something else, Beatrice was exonerated and they gave her a lifetime free bus pass as compensation.
Then Beatrice was inherited by her husband’s brother, Baba vaZero. She became his second wife. He died two years later and Beatrice came back to the village to live accompany by her last born son.
After a year of serious illness, Beatrice was diagnosed with HIV/Aids and she commenced treatment. Five years later, Beatrice is healthy and living with HIV. She takes her treatment and check-ups religiously and makes no secret of her positive status.
Sometimes she gets invited to talk to people in churches and women’s groups. Not once has Beatrice taken an anti-depressant tablet for her many episodes of sorrow.
In the past two decades, anti-depressant treatment for extreme sadness has become very common in Western societies. According to the World Health organisation, around the globe (including Zimbabwe), 450 million people suffer from depression.
It seems doctors do not hesitate to prescribe anti depression tablets. In America, the National Institute of Mental Health estimates that 14 million Americans suffer from major depression every year and 30 million Americans take antidepressants at a cost of over US$10 billion a year. There are chances that depression is not being diagnosed correctly and pharmaceutical companies are making billions in profit.
Sabina was just one person, among millions of Americans and others on the daily happy tablet intake. During her visit, Sabina kept on forgetting to take the antidepressants.
By the time she went back to America, she had stopped taking the blue pill altogether. Yet she looked happier than when she first arrived. Before she left, we told her that a tablet was only going to give her temporary happiness.
The choice was up to her to study hard and get a degree then get a better job and stay in America or return home to Zimbabwe where the community would give her more joy than the antidepressants would.

Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic. She holds a PhD in International Relations and is a consultant and director of The Simukai Development Project.